I get where you're coming from but I can't think of any quality applications that failed due to visibility alone.

There are definitely cases where "original" work doesn't get any traction, someone else comes along and makes a clone, gets more publicity, and becomes the "defacto" for that particular app. Hell, Angry Birds itself is the prime example of that - there were lots of similar games that existed well before it came along. It doesn't help to bring new ideas to the table if someone else can use your ideas and get the profit from it.

It's F2P in that you can earn gold coins in order to buy booster packs. But you'll end up earning them very slowly. Anyone who's spent money on packs will have a distinct advantage in games, because card synergy is important. The more cards you have that work together, the better your deck. When you're starting out, you'll be missing a lot of those synergies, meaning you'll lose a lot of your games.

If you just want to play for fun, and don't mind losing a lot, you can completely stay F2P. If you want to build competitive decks, you'll likely have to spend money.

You really can't be competitive without spending money. There are plenty of "expert" cards that will just wreck your deck, and you won't have any good way of fighting back. So it's fine if you don't mind losing more than you win, but if you want to be winning, you'll have to buy cards.

Pete wrote on Jan 13, 2014, 09:35:I remember playing the beta for jumpgate way back in the day, when I was out and about testing a bunch of mmo's. Wasn't that good, but I needed a sci-fi fix and it got the job done.

It wasn't that bad either, they just had some significant issues they never got around to fixing. The economy, for example, was pretty poorly thought out.

It was nice, however, to have an mmo where skill was a significant part of it. And the semi-Newtonian physics was a nice touch.

Malachii wrote on Dec 10, 2013, 12:21:I will never understand why the PC only crowd constantly bashes the console crowd. We're all gamers, and why we read this site daily. Most gamers use both consoles and PC's, and you would be doing yourself a disservice not to. For me personally, flying, fighting, Jrpg's, racing, etc win me over on consoles, the rest, PC's.

It's pretty simple, and has some degree of merit to it. As consoles became more popular, they became more and more the target audience for games. And as consoles are bad at certain things, games stopped including them. Games became more and more designed specifically for consoles. Hence the term "consolitis". That lead to a significant degradation of PC games. People who are only interested in playing PC games therefore became annoyed that their games were getting "dumbed down" for the people who played on consoles - hence the antagonism.

Creston wrote on Nov 22, 2013, 12:26:Something that confuses me about this game (and about Rebirth as well.)

Why is it that medium to low range systems seem to work well (relatively speaking), but more powerful systems suffer from performance problems.

Can someone explain that? It just seems weird to me.

They're mainly talking about relative framerate for high-end systems. Basically high-end systems weren't seeing much of an improvement over low/mid-range systems, especially if they were using SLI. So it's not that they were worse, or having more substantial performance issues, they just weren't as good as you'd expect.

Slashman wrote on Nov 17, 2013, 20:47:That's an optimistic view. Those fixes are probably close to a year's worth of work.

Well maybe they will use the modders' efforts to help. Still a long time before I buy.

One thing I'll give Egosoft credit for is the fact that they will put that time into fixing a game. And they won't charge for it like some companies do. So I'm relatively optimistic that some of the more egregious issues will be fixed.

I'm more interested in finding out if some of the poor gameplay choices can be modded out. Stuff like the stupid conversation mini-game, or the searching air ducts for credits. We'll see, I guess, but for now, it's probably the biggest disappointment I've had in a game in a long time.

I've definitely had more fun by restarting a free play mode game. A lot of the annoyances are still there, but I don't also have to contend with the campaign mode bugs. So far I've mainly been playing as a mercenary doing kill contracts. Not too bad, and a decent-ish way to make money. Although I'm not sure how well they scale, there doesn't seem to be any rankings like in the previous X games to base the prices off of.

Quboid wrote on Nov 16, 2013, 16:55:Why did this take 7 years, and why are design flaws so apparent now not picked up upon earlier? Hindsight is 20:20 and all that but even if I hadn't watched any gameplay, the indoor system's apparent flaws are so utterly predictable. From what I've seen, it's got repetitive interiors, badly made NPCs, lacklustre conversations with UI problems, and apparently no redeeming features. Does it even help the sense of scale in space?

Well, an entirely new engine, gorgeous graphics (I will say that, it looks better than any game in space I've ever seen) and a dev of roughly 20 people would account for the 7 years.

And I do actually think it DOES help the sense of scale that you're able to walk around on some of those stations. Well, it's not the walking around that does that, it's the skymap around the landing sites. The very first station you land on, the skymap really makes you feel as if you're on this giant asteroid mining facility.

So it does help somewhat, but why aren't all these people you need to find simply either on the landing pad, or in a market area just outside it? Freelancer did planets, and you didn't spend 10 minutes trying to find somebody. Privateer did planets, and everyone you needed to talk to was basically in the cantina right outside the landing pad.

Either that, or they heard Roberts was doing it, and went like "OMG WALKING AROUND SPACESTATIONS WE MUST HAVE THAT!"

Ah well.

They seem to have forgotten that gameplay trumps everything else. The new UI is just horrid. And the game elements that go with it are just as bad. Seriously, fly around to a bunch of "!" on the screen to get a discount price on merchandise? Have to do a mini-game (using the word very loosely) to be able to tell the stats on someone? Who at Egosoft thought that *anyone* would think those are good design decisions? If I'm going to be spending lots of time trading, make it fucking easy to do. Dicking me around and making me jump through pointless hoops is stupid. They really need to have someone who asks everyone making design decisions "Ok, does this make the game more fun?". Because so many of the decisions they made are pretty obviously worse.

Creston wrote on Nov 16, 2013, 02:09:I'm probably the biggest fan of the X series at Blues, and I'm really damn disappointed so far. Rebirth looks absolutely brilliant. Too bad the same can't be said for the way it plays. :(

Sadly I have to agree. I have no idea why they made so many of the design decisions they did, but most of them were absolutely the wrong ones imo. It feels like something they made for consoles, rather than the great PC focused games previously. They're going to lose a lot of fans over this - and deservedly so.

Controls are both easier and more annoying than previous games. It's really hard to get some of the information that you want (for example, I can pull up a list of ships I own, but can't find out where they are). Frankly, I think anyone who was put off by previous X games control systems won't find this any better.

The tutorial is a little better, but it still feels like it's somewhat rushed (it's basically the campaign). I'm sure I'll get to the point where I remember everything it's telling me eventually, but it's hard to keep up with things. The warp lanes are cool, but you travel through so many so quickly that getting lost - or feeling that way - is extremely easy.

The on-station stuff seems entirely pointless. Yes, you can walk around stations. But so far there doesn't seem to be any point. They could have easily given you the ability to communicate with people on stations and not lost anything. I guess people were asking for the ability to walk around, but to me, it just adds extra time and annoyance.

Graphically it's really nice to look at, I still need to fiddle with settings to figure out what's optimal, but it's definitely a step up.

Creston wrote on Nov 14, 2013, 01:14:They had joystick support in X2 and it was pretty broken. Lots of complaints about stuff not working, patches breaking things, etc. So if I'm not mistaken, they took joystick support out of X3. I honestly have no idea if it's back in or not (or never left.)

They didn't take joystick support out - that's how I played all of the X games. Never had a problem using the joystick either, even with X2. Not sure if I just got lucky or not, but I'd never try playing it with kb/m.